Tag: Integrated development environment

You’ve probably noticed that Android Studio doesn’t have a “clean” menu option. But we know that, like any build environment, there are intermediate files created that we may want to occasionally remove.

It turns out the solution is the command line. Simply open a command line in your project’s root folder (Usually named something like MyAppProject) and run the following command

gradlew clean

You’ll see something like this…

Notice that you get a bit of an unexpected message, “BUILD SUCCESSFUL”. This simply indicates that it has gone through and successfully cleaned out the intermediate files. I’ve found that when dealing with larger projects its not uncommon to reduce the amount of disk space used by the project by 70% or more.

So a bit of an unexpected solution (especially for those who’ve been in a Windows environment for a long time) but an easy one.

Android Studio 0.2.0 update … encountering issues with both new AND existing projects.

I’m fortunate that using the latest and (sometimes not so) greatest is actually my job. With that I’ve been able to heavily use Android Studio ever since it was first released. To my knowledge, I’ve installed and heavily used every public update since the release.

Everyone of those updates went pretty smooth … until this one.

The switch to Android Studio 0.2.0 has, by far, been the bumpiest upgrade yet. After installing it…

Ican’t generate new projects

I can’t build existing projects.

Not much I can get done without being able to do one or the other. 🙂

The good news is that resolving these issues was pretty easy.

Can’t generate new projects

This issue appears to be specific to folks using Android Studio on Windows.

I initially let Android Studio handle the install as I had always done previously. Once the install completed, any attempt to create a new project resulted in the following error…

Can’t build existing projects

This turned out to be a two-fold problem for me.

The first issue has to do with a fairly well documented change that’s been made to Android Studio. They’ve changed to a new version of Gradle that’s not backward compatible. As a result an attempt to build a project that was created with a prior version of Android Studio shows the following error.

The fix is to change the version of Gradle that’s referenced in your project’s build.gradle file (located in top-level of project folder). If you click on the “Search in build.gradle files” link in the above dialog it’ll open the build.gradle file for you. Or you can just open the build.gradle file yourself. It’s quite small and easy to navigate.

To fix the problem simply change the line that reads

classpath ‘com.android.tools.build:gradle:0.4‘

to

classpath ‘com.android.tools.build:gradle:0.5.+’

This will cause Android Studio to use the required version of Gradle.

But trouble continues…

With that fix made, I would then get an error indicating

“FAILURE:Could not determine which tasks to execute”

The problem is related to extraneous entries that were added to the [ProjectName].iml file (in your project’s top-level folder) by earlier versions of Android Studio.

To fix the problem, exit Android Studio and open the [ProjectName].iml file in an editor and delete the entire component element with the name “FacetManager”.

And with that … SUCCESS!! … I’m now able to build the project without difficulty.

Wrap Up

So the cleanup isn’t too difficult but does require some work. If you’re encountering issues other than those I’ve mentioned above the Android Studio folks have posted a couple of helpful pages addressing a variety of issues

As you’ll recall, I posted yesterday about working around the issue in Android Studio where copying a project to a new folder creates problems because the Android Studio project keeps references to the original folder. After my post yesterday, I figured out an easier way to work around the problem.

You still have to modify just as many files but the steps are easier to follow and perform than my suggestion from yesterday.

The cool thing about this workaround is that after copying the project to the folder, you always make the same (relatively simple) changes. There’s nothing specific about the destination folder in the changes we make.

Note: I’m including line numbers just as estimates. Your line numbers will almost definitely be different.

Be sure that Android Studio is completely closed.

In both of the following files, change the value for PROJECT_ABSOLUTE_PATH to be blank

Change:

To:

And with that, you’re ready to open the destination project in Android Studio.

When you save the project, Android Studio will automatically save the new folder as the PROJECT_ABSOLUTE_PATH value.

I’m finding these changes much easier to manage than the ones I walked through yesterday. But as I mentioned yesterday, the best news of all is that I suspect that this will be a short lived bug and we won’t have to deal with this workaround for long.

Since I write training courses about Android development, I frequently have to copy projects from one folder to another. I commonly create a project in a “before” folder, copy the project to an “after” folder, and then do the work being discussed in the course in the project in the “after” folder. When students view the course they can download “before” and “after” copies of the project.

Well one of the pains I’ve been dealing with in the preview release of Android Studio is the fact that when a project is copied from one folder to another, the project keeps pointers to the original folder. One ends up with a mess where some things in the new project point to the new folder and somethings point to the old. Deleting the original folder makes things even worse.

I’ve reported the issue as an Android Studio bug. It appears to have been accepted as an issue but as of this writing the version of Android Studio currently available still has the problem.

The version available as of this writing…

I’m certain this is an issue that will be addressed so if you’re reading this post substantially beyond the posting date, verify that the problem still exists before doing the steps I list here.

Change:

To:

5.
Now open the project in Android Studio

You may be prompted with a dialog indicating that it’s removing a non-existent project. Let it do that. It’s just cleaning up some internal data, it doesn’t appear to have any impact on the original project.

Voila! We now have a copy of our project.

The best news of all … I’m pretty sure that the bug that’s causing us to have to go through all of these steps (rather than simply copying the project folder) is a bug that will soon be fixed.

Have you noticed a shortening of your laptop’s battery life when working with Android Studio?

Android Studio is a great tool and some of the great things it does require fairly substantial processing to occur in the background. Much of this processing is constantly firing performing what are called Inspections.

To get a sense of the kind of background work that’s going on, choose Project \ Settings from the Android Studio menu and then highlight Inspections in the Project Settings pane.

To save power we could go through and turn off some of these inspections so that less background processing occurs. These inspections are good stuff, though. I prefer to have these checks available. Fortunately, Android Studio doesn’t require us to make this choice.

Android Studio gives us the option of stopping the automatic checks and instead running them on demand. You can prevent these inspections from automatically running by selecting Project \ Power Save Mode in the Android Studio menu.

You can then run the checks manually by choosing Analyze \ Inspect Code… from the Android Studio menu.

With this, we get the benefit of Android Studio code inspection while still maximizing our laptop battery life.

The stability of the initial preview release of Android Studio (version 0.1) was pretty impressive. Being built on a long-standing product like JetBrains Intellij IDEA gave it a great start.

That said, it did at times feel like a version 0 product … unexpected message boxes popping up, strange behavior in the feature that displays the string value where string resources are used (sometimes didn’t work .. sometimes showed the string value on a different line than where the resource appeared), those sort’a things.

About a week or so after the initial release Android Studio automatically updated to Android Studio 0.1.1 and there was some improvement but not a huge amount.

Well then yesterday, I received another update, Android Studio 0.1.2 (Build #AI-130.692269) … I’ve only been using it for less than 24 hours but so far this build feels MUCH MUCH better. It’s feeling much more stable.

If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to download Android Studio and start checking it out. I’m sure there will still be some issues but it’s improving quickly and IMHO is already so much better than using Eclipse that any minor annoyances are a small price to pay to have such a superior dev tool.